so the story has always been okay we can't clean it up so the best thing we can do is not make it
worth but to me that's a very uninspiring view. My name is Boyan Slat and I'm the founder and
CEO at the Ocean Cleanup.
Days of sailing from civilization you almost never come across boats or things it's just
either alone with the plastic and just come across plastic so regularly it's quite a weird
experience in the middle of nowhere. The Ocean Cleanup has developed first feasible technology
to clean up almost half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 10 years time. Our goal is to
develop advanced technologies to to put systems in all rivers and all oceans in the world.
So here we have in the water what we call the multi-level troll which were developed by some
engineers that we have at the Ocean Cleanup. Our main mission here is to better understand
how floating plastics get distributed in the first meters of the oceans because even though
plastic floats because of the waves and the wind it pushes plastic down particularly the tiny ones
so one of the things that we know most about of the plastic floating at sea is what we call
microplastics. These are tiny fragments of plastics they are smaller than five millimeter in size
and they come mostly from the breakdown of plastic objects that get lost or discarded at sea.
If you see the the trash that we've been picking up from from the oceans it's a nice one. They are
mostly buoys and fishing parades ropes and things that comes from vessels. Because of the UV light
so basically sunlight and heat it makes the plastic brittle and it starts to break down into smaller
and smaller pieces. From this mass of plastic floating at sea how much of it is situated on
debris of different sizes so should we focus the cleanup operations on tiny plastics is it
microplastics mesoplastics or mega debris. That is correct our next port will be Horta over.
So really the goal of these two expeditions is to see how deep the plastic is right now there
just this is still too much uncertainty and the information that we're collecting will be used
to better inform the engineers currently developing the technologies to clean up the oceans.
All right let's rumble boys and girls put on your science pants right in the pit.
Essentially what happens is the trawl is lying flat on deck and we take 12 or 13 people really
working all in unison to get it up off the deck into the water. I don't see my experiences that
either something moves or tries to kill you or both and then ease it back out so it's towing
far enough out that it toes at the right depth. We're doing a multi-level trawl which is about
five and a half meter long aluminum ladder frame with 11 nets spaced down it that sets
vertically in the water. We're getting 11 measurements of ocean plastic concentrations
and this way we get a high-resolution depth profile of plastic pollution into the garbage
batch. Everybody has to work the team or else it's going to end very badly for somebody or
something. We are having this sort of hundred pound device of 15 feet long hovering in mid-air on the same height as our heads are. It's quite an operation I would say.
And it's actually a very pioneer work. We are getting the first high-resolution measurements of plastic into the first shallow layers of ocean.
The first time I really saw any plastic pollution out at sea it surprised me how powerful it was to see that.
It's really hard to wrap your head around how you can be thousands of miles from land and here you go
seeing a light bulb floating by, an intact light bulb or buckets or buoys or toothbrushes or whatever it is.
There's an unbelievable amount of just trash floating in the oceans. The plastic is creating an
artificial environment for species that didn't occur here to come and inhabit an area that before
was mostly blue and with only a few oceanic species.
There were trigger fish that were swimming underneath it and when they moved we saw four or five dolphin fish.
Quite remarkable to see. We weren't very far out of Bermuda before we started seeing bits of plastic floating in the ocean.
And frankly it's shocking. It's disturbingly ugly in this otherwise very beautiful place. It doesn't belong here.
It's what you don't see as well. And as soon as you see what you can't see with your naked eye that's even more of a punch to the gut.
Here you are looking at the bluest blue of the sea. It's that endless blue.
You troll and in the bottom of the net, in the cod ends, here's a handful of colorful microplastic.
The highest we ever got.
That's crazy. That's very crazy.
So it was a very surprising for me to actually experience the impact that we create in such a remote area of our oceans.
So it is time to act and the quicker we act the better.
We're going to think more carefully about what we do with plastic.
Hopefully it will influence my children, my grandchildren to be more responsible about the way they use and dispose of plastic.
Because people, especially living on land where you're not surrounded by it and seeing it every day, dispute it this vast endless sort of wasteland and it's not.
Their oceans are big but they're not limitless and I think people are very close to pushing those limits and stepping over the limits of what the oceans can handle.
Thank you.
